Norwegian Air will use 787-9s on four new U.S. routes next year. (Image: Norwegian)

Fast-growing, low-cost European carrier Norwegian just announced four more new U.S. routes coming in 2018, leading some to wonder if the ambitious airline is growing too fast for its own good.

The company’s latest plans include new service from Los Angeles to Milan Malpensa starting June 16; and from LAX to Madrid beginning July 15. It will operate four flights a week on both routes. From New York JFK, Norwegian will operate new service to Amsterdam starting May 7, with four weekly flights; and to Madrid July 18, with three flights a week. All the new routes will be served with 787-9s.

No-frills fare, high fee fares from LAX will start at $229 one-way, while New York fares will begin at $199 to Amsterdam and $229 to Madrid. Premium cabin fares start at $729 and $739 from LAX to Madrid and Milan respectively, and at $619/$649 to Amsterdam and Madrid from JFK.

These four routes are just a part of new Norwegian service already announced for 2018. Other new routes and starting dates include Oakland to Rome (February 6); Newark to Paris (February 28); Chicago to London (March 25); Austin to London (March 27); Denver to Paris (April 9); Oakland to Paris (April 10), and Boston to Paris (May 2);

Norwegian’s current and upcoming U.S. routes. (Image: Norwegian)

All that is on top of 25 U.S. routes that the carrier inaugurated in 2017. And look for more new service in the months ahead: Norwegian said it has just acquired another 28 weekly takeoff and landing slots at London Gatwick, available starting next summer. “Planning work is now underway to allocate the newly acquired slots, and will be announced at a later stage,” the company said.

This explosive growth is leading some investors in the company to worry that the airline might be overextending itself, considering its financial performance. A recent analysis in the Financial Times noted that Norwegian’s fleet is adding 32 aircraft in 2017, for a total of 145; and will keep growing to 193 planes by the end of 2019. The report said Norwegian had a second-quarter operating loss of $104 million, while its unit costs rose by 6 percent in the third quarter. The company’s share price has plunged 40 percent this year, the report said, while its European competitors’ stock has been rising sharply.

One analyst quoted in the article said Norwegian has new aircraft coming online so fast that it can’t absorb them all, so it has started leasing some to other companies and selling older ones. It also quoted a senior banker in Norway as saying that Norwegian is “in trouble. They are over-extended and it’s clear that they have to do something.”

Have you flown Norwegian…or benefitted from its impact on transatlantic fares this year? Please discuss.

Delta started taking delivery of single-aisle Airbus A321s early last year, and it must like them, because it just placed a big order for a bunch of the newest version of that plane.

The company said it has come to terms with Airbus to place firm orders for 100 A321neos, with options for another 100 beyond that. Deliveries are due to start in 2020.

According to Delta’s website, it now has 26 A321-200s in its fleet. Those planes carry 192 passengers – 20 in first class, 29 in Comfort+ and 143 in economy, or about the same number as the 757s they are replacing.

The A321neos will have 197 seats, Delta said, including 20 in first, 30 in Comfort+ and 147 in economy. The A321s will replace “smaller, less technically advanced aircraft,” Delta noted. According to FlightGlobal.com, the new jets will replace Delta’s aging A320s, B757s and MD80s.

The higher-tech A321neos will feature high-speed, satellite-based Wi-Fi and on-demand entertainment, with power ports and streaming video content available at each seat through Delta Studio, the airline said. Cabins’ overhead bins will be 25 percent larger, and cabin lighting will be full-spectrum LED.

The A321neo (the “neo” stands for “new engine option”) is also popular at other U.S. airlines. For instance, Alaska’s Virgin America unit is currently deploying them on several Hawaii and mainland routes; Hawaiian Airlines is about to start flying them from mainland cities to the islands; and Frontier Airlines recently placed an order for 134 A320neos and A321neos.

According to Airbus, the single-aisle planes in its “neo” group are about 20 percent more fuel-efficient than regular A319/20/21s. Airbus said “typical” seating for an A321neo would be 206 in a two-class layout – although the aircraft could have as many as 240 seats. The A321neo has a range of 7,400 km. (about 4,600 miles or 4,000 nautical miles) vs. 5,900 km. for a regular A321 – or about 25 percent more.

Have you flown on an A321 yet? How’d you like it? How does it compare to your favorite Boeing plane?

Now that United, Delta and American have all rolled out no-frills Basic Economy fares on domestic flights to compete with the prices charged by ultra-low-cost carriers, are those carriers running scared?

Frontier Airlines isn’t. Quite the opposite: Frontier this week announced plans for a massive purchase of new aircraft. Combined with its earlier aircraft orders that haven’t yet been delivered, the deal would triple the size of Frontier’s fleet in 10 years, from 70 planes today to more than 200.

The company said it intends to purchase 100 new A320neos and 34 A321neos from Airbus, for delivery from 2021 to 2026. That’s in addition to 67 A320neos already in the purchase pipeline, and an existing order for 18 A319neos that Frontier is converting to A320s.

“By 2026, we will be in a position to deliver ‘Low Fares Done Right’ to more than 50 million passengers a year,” said Frontier CEO Barry Biffle in announcing the fleet expansion. In 2016, the airline carried 15 million passengers.

Frontier’s route network is constantly shifting as it adds and drops markets. But a few months ago, the airline announced plans to add 21 cities to its system by next spring, and to add more frequencies on other routes that it already serves. That includes a larger presence at its Denver base and at San Jose, among other cities.

Frontier’s fortunes have been rising in recent years. The Denver Post said that in filings related to an impending public stock offering, Frontier reported that its net income increased from $140 million in 2014 to $200 million last year as its fuel costs have been dropping and its ancillary revenues have been increasing.

Frontier’s ultra-low-cost carrier business model relies on ancillary fees from all kinds of amenities and services to supplement its low fares. A July 2017 report from Ideaworks said that in 2016, more than 42 percent of Frontier’s revenues came from ancillary fees – compared with just 7.7 percent in 2011, before it changed its business model.

The airline’s ambitious growth plan will initially focus on its Denver hub, where it will add most of the new routes announced last summer. That could mean a big battle for market share at DEN, since United Airlines also has plans to enlarge its hub there, and Southwest has grown rapidly at Denver in recent years as well.

Denver International will get 39 more gates in the next few years. (Image: Jim Glab)

According to FlightGlobal.com, United’s chief pilot in Denver said in a letter to other pilots last week that United plans to increase its Denver operations from the current 363 daily departures to 400 in 2019, and that DEN could eventually become United’s second-largest hub (after Chicago O’Hare).

Fortunately, Denver should be able to accommodate plenty of growth. Airport officials recently said that their plans to expand the passenger concourses have been revised: Instead of building 26 new aircraft gates in the next four years, they now plan to build 39.

Hawaiian Airlines’ aircraft livery and logo hasn’t been updated in 15 years, so the company decided it was time for a refresh – and it unveiled the modified look this week.

The new look is nice, but fares to Hawaii on Hawaiian and other carriers have remained stubbornly high for the last several months. It’s now very rare if not impossible to find roundtrip fares from the West Coast below $400. For summer season, most fares from the West Coast are already in the $500-$700 range. Ouch. When fares stay high, that means demand is high- which is good for the airlines and helps fund improvements like updated liveries. But it makes it an even pricier proposition to get to paradise! (Which is why I recently turned to my frequent flyer miles to pay for a recent trip.) But I digress.

This is Hawaiian’s current livery which will soon be phased out (Image: Airbus)

Hawaiian’s new livery features more purple and deeper orange, and it retains the image of the Hawaiian maiden called Pualani on the tail, but with a new design– and a bit of a grin. A silver rendering of a flower wreath known as a Maile lei is wrapped around the fuselage.

The modification will be extended to the rest of its 50-plane fleet in the months to come.

The new look “is the next step in a series of major investments that Hawaiian has made to aircraft cabins, lounges, and other aspects of the experience over the past five years,” a spokesperson said. “The airline will also roll out new uniforms for its frontline employees by the end of 2017.”

Last month, Hawaiian revealed the interior designs for the new Airbus A321s that it plans to start flying on routes to the West Coast. The carrier also recently started selling new premium cabin lie-flat seats on its A330s.

Which airline do you fly most often to Hawaii? Why? Please leave your comments below.

United plans some changes to its operations to win back domestic business travelers. (Photo: Chris McGinnis)

Executives at United Airlines have been making a lot of noise in recent months about becoming tougher competitors in domestic markets, especially in the business travel realm, and President Scott Kirby this week spelled out some specific tactics for achieving that goal.

Regrettably, that does not mean lower fares (as we learned in this TravelSkills post) — instead, United says it is going to work on making flying United easier.

In a conference call about the airline’s quarterly earnings, Kirby mentioned three strategies to bring more business travelers back to the carrier – all of them aimed at “restoring the domestic network to its natural share in our hubs,” as he put it. (In other words, winning back market share that United has lost to competitors.)

Business travelers should find more short-notice seats available on United. But how much will they cost? (Image: Jim Glab)

Those strategies are:

1- Making it easier for us to find seats when we need them. Business travelers are notorious for not booking too far in advance, and Kirby said United has been selling off its inventory too early. “If your goal is to keep bookings high, the easiest way to do that is to lower the prices, and that’s exactly what United was doing,” he said, relying heavily on sales of advance-purchase discount fares.

The problem with that was “we sold out too soon…we forced many of our best customers to fly on our competitors because we were sold out.” But now the airline is “willing to take much more risk that high-yield business customers are going to choose United if we just keep seats available for them.” That has worked in the first quarter, he said, with higher-revenue “close-in bookings” showing a 12 percent increase year-over-year. See what we mean about not lowering fares?

United wants to take regional jets off key business routes . (Image: United)

2- Offering flights between major cities on larger, more comfortable aircraft. Kirby took a jab at United’s previous management for putting smaller jets on the wrong routes, and said that is changing. “United never should have been flying regional jets in markets like Chicago to Washington National or Newark to Atlanta,” he said. The company is changing that pattern by using larger aircraft, “mostly in places where we historically did fly larger planes,” he noted. Smaller jets will be used mainly on “smaller markets that drive better connectivity to our hubs, places like Champaign, Illinois and Rochester, Minnesota.” Sounds like a good idea, but we’ve heard from plenty of TravelSkills readers who’ve grown to love United’s new 2-class Embraer aircraft with comfortable 2×2 seating in the back and big square windows…

3- Shorter layovers at its hubs. Later this year, Kirby said, United will begin “re-banking” flight schedules at its hub airports. That refers to the common industry practice of scheduling “banks” or clusters of inbound and outbound flights in specific time windows to maximize the number of quick connections without long layovers. The airline will reportedly begin the process at Chicago O’Hare, Houston Bush Intercontinental and Washington Dulles. Shorter layovers sound great, but when summer thunderstorms hit Chicago or Houston, better watch out… those tighter turnarounds tend to fall apart.

What else can United do to win you back…or keep you from fleeing to competitors? Would you pay more for United if its operations improve? Please leave your comments below.

As customers demand big improvements in in-flight Wi-Fi service, Delta said this week it plans to more than double the number of aircraft in its fleet that are equipped with the latest generation of high-speed satellite links, and to bring live streaming TV to those aircraft as well.

The airline said it will extend Wi-Fi vendor Gogo’s new 2Ku satellite-based technology to an additional 350 aircraft, giving it a total of 600 planes with the fast connections. What’s more, “In late 2016, Delta will launch IPTV, giving customers the ability to watch live TV from their own devices on 2Ku-enabled aircraft,” Delta said.

Wi-Fi technology is moving faster than most airlines can keep up. Delta has almost finished installing the first-generation satellite-based Ku band technology on its international widebody fleet of 747s, 767s, 777s and A330s as well as long-haul 757s.

But that is being superseded by Gogo’s 2Ku system, which Delta says “will offer customers faster speeds and bandwidth more than 20 times that of Gogo’s ATG (air-to-ground) technology, allowing for video streaming functionality.” Gogo started out by offering only land-based ATG links, but has had to transition to satellites to keep up with the competition.

The airline said it has already started to install 2Ku systems on its 737-800 and A319 fleets, “and additional fleets will be retrofitted with the new system.” It expects to offer 2Ku on 35 planes by the end of this year. The 2Ku Wi-Fi will also be available on the new A330-900Neos and A350-900s that Delta has on order for delivery over the next few years, the company said.

For starters, the airline will swap out an existing order with Boeing for 10 787-9 Dreamliners to 10 777-300ERs instead. United also said it will extend the lifespan of 21 767-300s that had been slated for retirement by adding winglets to them to save fuel; those aircraft will replace some 757s on medium-haul international routes. As nice as a new 777 is, they don’t come with those nice big Dreamliner windows and curvy wings.

Also, 10 of United’s existing 777-200s will be pulled off international service and overhauled to fly regularly scheduled domestic routes — something you don’t see very often with twin-aisle aircraft. (That’s good news for domestic flyers– wider is almost always better.)

And like its rivals, United will continue to pull 50-seat jets out of its United Express fleet — 130 of them by the end of this year — as the industry trend to larger regional jets continues.

ALSO…According to Airlineroute.net, which tracks planned changes in airlines’ route networks, United will switch from single-aisle 757s to twin-aisle 767s on four Europe routes out of Newark, including Berlin starting in June, and Hamburg, Madrid and Barcelona effective October 25 …

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Editor Chris McGinnis

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